How to Make a Behavior Intervention Plan for an Autistic Child

Autistic children often have difficult behaviors because they lack the ability to communicate their needs and wants in an appropriate way. To eliminate the unwanted behaviour, the child needs to be helped to have their needs and wants met in a constructive way.

Steps

1. Early detection is key to making a behavior intervention plan for a child with autism. The earlier autism is detected, the bigger the difference you can make.
2. Target only one behavior at a time. Different negative behaviors likely have different causes, and thus different solutions, and it is too difficult to address all of these at once.
3. To identify possible reasons for the behavior, keep a log of what happens before the behavior, the behavior itself, and what happens after (For example: At 4:30, Joey came into the kitchen and grabbed two cookies. When I told him he could not have them, he began to throw a tantrum. When he calmed down, I gave him a cookie).
4. After keeping this log for several days to a week, try to identify the cause of the behavior. In the above example, Joey's tantrums are the result of a desired item (cookie) being taken away after he tried to access them inappropriately. Brainstorm possible reasons: perhaps Joey is very hungry at 4:30, and wants to express that he needs something to eat.
5. Provide a way for the child to get their need met in an appropriate way. Depending on the skills of the child, he could be taught to ask for a snack (I want a snack please). For a non-verbal child, provide pictures of snacks the child likes, and teach him to exchange the picture for a snack when he is hungry.
6. If you have correctly identified the cause of the problem behavior and provided a solution that works for the child, the problem behavior should decrease.
7. Remember, positive strategies help more than negative ones.
8. You must maintain the trust of the child if you want results.
9. If the problem behavior does not decrease, go back to making a log of the behavior, and look for different possible causes and/or solutions.

Tips

• Remember that behavior communicates something - "I'm upset", "I'm scared", "I need your attention", "I'm bored" , etc. What the autistic child is communicating may or may not be appropriate to the situation, but figuring out what the message could be can help you find possible solutions.
• Choose one very specific behavior that you want to change, e.g. throwing food at meals, not "She gets mad and throws everything all the time".
• Determine what happens before the behavior that might be causing it, for instance, does the child with autism finish eating more quickly that everyone else? Is there some way you can eliminate or change that thing to eliminate the behavior?

Warnings

• Be aware that children with autism can be affected by things you might not even notice, for instance you always eat off of certain plates and you changed them, someone is sitting in a different place, you ate before bath time rather than after, etc.

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